📊STATISTICS EDUCATION topic overview

My statistics education research focuses the factors that shape students' engagement and success and how we measure those experiences. While much of my work has centred on statistics anxiety, motivation, and statistical literacy, I am broadly interested in the measurement foundations of statistics education research itself.

My interest in this area grew from observing the challenges many learners experience when engaging with quantitative methods and wondering why some students thrive while others struggle, and how educational environments can better support diverse learners.

A major strand of my current research examines the validity of commonly used statistics education constructs and measures. Recent work has questioned whether statistics anxiety represents a construct distinct from mathematics anxiety, while ongoing projects explore what the Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS) is actually measuring and whether it functions equivalently across languages and groups.

Alongside this work, I continue to research broader questions relating to teaching and learning in quantitative methods, including the role of neurodiversity, statistical software, and open science education. 

Across all these areas, my goal is to improve both our understanding of how students learn statistics and the quality of the evidence used to study that learning.

✨Research highlights 

📝 A Fault in our STARS? Re-examining the overlap between Statistics Anxiety & mathematics anxiety

Jenny Terry, the SMARVUS Team, and Andy Field (2026)

This programme of research examined whether the Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS) captures anything distinct from the Revised Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale (R-MARS). Across two large-scale, multi-sample, pre-registered studies, multiple psychometric and other quantitative analyses suggested remarkably little separation between the constructs. The findings raise important questions about how statistics anxiety has been conceptualised and measured in higher education research. 

Read the pre-print of the first and second studies →

🚧current Projects & PRe-PRINTS

Lead/Senior Researcher:

• Are self-reported statistics grades accurate (enough)? [PRE-PRINT]

• How have theories been used to explain the relationship between statistics anxiety and statistical literacy? [PRE-PRINT]

• Which construct(s) is the Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS) actually measuring?

• Does measurement invariance hold for the Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS) across languages?

• What role does expectancy-value theory play in career goals?

Contributing Researcher:

• Is there a statistics awarding gap for neurodivergent students?

• What impact do fictional narratives have on learning statistics?

• What do we know about teaching and learning of different statistical software packages?

• What are adult learners’ experiences of using different statistical software packages?

• How is statistics and open science taught across life science disciplines?

📑publications

Janos Salamon, Jenny Terry, András Zsidó, Balazs Aczel, & Tamás Nagy. (2026). Statistics anxiety: validity, measurement invariance, and educational correlates in the Hungarian STARS. Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2026.2646167 

Jenny Terry, Laura Le, Rhys Jones, Jamie Sergeant, Bruce Dunham, & Elinor Jones. (2025). Education research: Getting started. Teaching Statistics, 48, S53–S66. https://doi.org/10.1111/test.70008

Madeleine Pownall, Jenny Terry, Elizabeth Collins, Martina Sladekova and Abigail Jones. (2023). UK Psychology PhD researchers’ knowledge, perceptions, and experiences of open science. Cogent Psychology, 10(1).   https://doi.org/10.1080/23311908.2023.2248765 

Jenny Terry, the SMARVUS Team, and Andy Field. (2023). Data from an International Multi-Centre Study of Statistics and Mathematics Anxieties and Related Variables in University Students (the SMARVUS Dataset). Journal of Open Psychology Data, 11(1), 8. https://doi.org/10.5334/jopd.80 

Madeleine Pownall, Flávio Azevedo, ..., Jenny Terry, ... FORRT. (2023). Teaching open and reproducible scholarship: a critical review of the evidence base for current pedagogical methods and their outcomes. Royal Society Open Science, 10:221255. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.221255 

🗂️posters, presentations, & RESOURCES